Issue 32

In this issue we present one of Rome’s greatest un-success stories: the extravagant yet impractical city of Clunia in northern Spain.
Two thousand years ago, with the booming Roman political machine behind it, Clunia was made into the administrative capital of the province of Tarraconensis. The main aim of the city was to convey prestige. Among its glut of grandiose structures was the 9,000-seat theatre shown on the front cover of this issue – the largest in all Iberia Despite Oscar Wilde’s famous witticism that ‘Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess,’ the opulent Clunia did not succeed. Instead, it fell into disuse.
Why? After all, the city occupied an enviably strategic military position, dominating a vast plateau c.1,000m above sea level. It also had an impressive infrastructure for providing and removing water to rival those in use today. Archaeologists have been working hard to discover more, but what have they revealed?

In this issue we present one of Rome’s greatest un-success stories: the extravagant yet impractical city of Clunia in northern Spain.Two thousand years ago, with the booming Roman political machine behind it, Clunia was made into the administrative capital of the province of Tarraconensis. The main aim of the city was to convey prestige. Among […]

It is a problem that has frustrated many an archaeologist faced with recreating an ancient wall painting, mosaic or pot: just how to fit the thousands of jigsaw pieces together to recreate the original. This article is an extract from the full article published in World Archaeology Issue 32. Click here to subscribe

Cattle, sheep and goats were domesticated by the 8th millennium BC but until recently the earliest evidence for milk processing, most likely to make butter, ghee, yogurt and cheese, came from the 5th millennium BC. This article is an extract from the full article published in World Archaeology Issue 32. Click here to subscribe

Far from the Amazon being virgin forest, it once supported a network of densely populated towns, according to Prof. Mike Heckenberger, from the University of Florida, in Gainesville, whose team has found evidence of a grid-like pattern of settlements connected by road networks and arranged around large central plazas in the Upper Xingu region of […]